Last week during the the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Intel organized a Rule the Stack contest. That's the third one, after Atlanta a year ago and Paris six months ago. In case you missed earlier episodes, SUSE won the two previous contests with Dirk being pretty fast in Atlanta and Adam completing the HA challenge so we could keep the crown. So of course, we had to try again!

For this contest, the rules came with a list of penalties and bonuses which made it easier for people to participate. And indeed, there were quite a number of participants with the schedule for booking slots being nearly full. While deploying Kilo was a goal, you could go with older releases getting a 10 minutes penalty per release (so +10 minutes for Juno, +20 minutes for Icehouse, and so on). In a similar way, the organizers wanted to see some upgrade and encouraged that with a bonus that could significantly impact the results (-40 minutes) — nobody tried that, though.

And guess what? SUSE kept the crown again. But we also went ahead with a new challenge: outperforming everyone else not just once, but twice, with two totally different methods.

For the super-fast approach, Dirk built again an appliance that has everything pre-installed and that configures the software on boot. This is actually not too difficult thanks to the amazing Kiwi tool and all the knowledge we have accumulated through the years at SUSE about building appliances, and also the small scripts we use for the CI of our OpenStack packages. Still, it required some work to adapt the setup to the contest and also to make sure that our Kilo packages (that were brand new and without much testing) were fully working. The clock result was 9 minutes and 6 seconds, resulting in a negative time of minus 10 minutes and 54 seconds (yes, the text in the picture is wrong) after the bonuses. Pretty impressive.

But we also wanted to show that our product would fare well, so Adam and I started looking at this. We knew it couldn't be faster than the way Dirk picked, and from the start, we targetted the second position. For this approach, there was not much to do since this was similar to what he did in Paris, and there was work to update our SUSE OpenStack Cloud Admin appliance recently. Our first attempt failed miserably due to a nasty bug (which was actually caused by some unicode character in the ID of the USB stick we were using to install the OS... we fixed that bug later in the night). The second attempt went smoother and was actually much faster than we had anticipated: SUSE OpenStack Cloud deployed everything in 23 minutes and 17 seconds, which resulted in a final time of 10 minutes and 17 seconds after bonuses/penalties. And this was with a 10 minutes penalty due to the use of Juno (as well as a couple of minutes lost debugging some setup issue that was just mispreparation on our side). A key contributor to this result is our use of Crowbar, which we've kept improving over time, and that really makes it easy and fast to deploy OpenStack.

Wall-clock time for SUSE OpenStack Cloud

These two results wouldn't have been possible without the help of Tom and Ralf, but also without the whole SUSE OpenStack Cloud team that works on a daily basis on our product to improve it and to adapt it to the needs of our customers. We really have an awesome team (and btw, we're hiring)!

For reference, three other contestants succeeded in deploying OpenStack, with the fastest of them ending at 58 minutes after bonuses/penalties. And as I mentioned earlier, there were even more contestants (including some who are not vendors of an OpenStack distribution), which is really good to see. I hope we'll see even more in Tokyo!

Results of the Rule the Stack contest

Also thanks to Intel for organizing this; I'm sure every contestant had fun and there was quite a good mood in the area reserved for the contest.

Update: See also the summary of the contest from the organizers.

We've seen two Dynamic DNS clients. We'll see another one here.

1. First of all, install the program.


2. Create the confing file


with the following content


Change the ones that are in bold letters.

3. Start the service


Reboot

We've seen how to create an SD card. I used the 13.1 version. The wiki page https://en.opensuse.org/HCL:Raspberry_Pi is not very clear (to me) about resize partitions. So I tried to upgrade the version 13.1. Here what I did.

1. Check if the update repository already exists and is enabled.


You should have the following enabled


If not, then add it


2. Refresh and update your system


3. Remove all third party/OBS repos you no longer need.


4. Change all remaining repo URLs to the new version of the distribution (needs to be run as root).


5. Change the repos.


6. Refresh new repositories (you might be asked to accept new gpg key)


If you haven't removed third party/OBS repositories you may encounter some errors as these repositories may not exist yet or they may have different unguessable URL. It is always recommended to remove them and add their newer version after upgrade.

7. Upgrade


Now you have to wait. Reboot at the end, just to be sure that everything went smooth.

A good question is why do you want to sync a folder on your Raspberry Pi with a cloud service. The answer is little complicated. It's a subproject that I'm working on right now. I want to upload some data I'll create on a Raspberry Pi (with limited size of SD card). The uploaded data will be saved on other computer and the SD will be clear again to create new data.

The cloud service I prefer is always ownCloud.
Here I used http://www.copy.com. It provides 15GB of disk but you can increase it.

First of all download the file


Then extract it


This will create a folder called “copy,” and in it there will be three sub-folders: “armv6h,” “x86,” and “x86_64.” The first one contains the Copy client binaries for the Raspberry Pi, the second contains the Copy client for 32-bit Linux on a PC, and the third the same client but for 64-bit Linux PCs.


Now there are 2 ways of using copy. The CopyCmd tool and CopyConsole.


CopyCmd

List of the directories

Upload all content of local /home/user/directory/ to remote /directory

CopyConsole

The CopyConsole tool keeps a folder on your Raspberry Pi synchronized with the data on Copy.com.
The sync app runs in the background and is started like this:


This will sync the local /home/user/directory to copy.com. If you delete something from there, it'll delete from local folder as well.

Remeber to run this command everytime you restart your pi. It's better to run it manually because there is username and password that are personal (unless you created an account just for your raspberry pi).

Raspberry Pi is a quite slow ARM board, compared to other boards. Even if you compare Raspberry Pi B+ against Raspberry Pi 2. So maybe one of the best use of RasPi is to make it seedbox. Let's say you're at the office and a friend tells you to test a distro. You can login to your home Raspberry Pi seedbox and add the torrent file there.

Here I will show you how to setup Transmission, vftpd and suggestions for Android programs.
First of all, download and create the openSUSE SD card (resize your SD card to full size or you can mount the extra size as extra partition. Since it's not something important, then you can use full size of your SD card).
Then setup the dynamic dns service (see previous posts).
Finally set a static IP (to use it with port forward of your router).


INSTALL TRANSMISSION
First install transmission:

Create 2 folders for incomplete torrents and completed torrents:


Configure proper permissions for transmission:


Now edit transmission settings.json file using:

Here is the content of your file:

Username: transmission
Password: transmission
Port: 9091

Start and enable the service.


You're done. All you have to do is to open your browser to http://RASPI.IP.ADDRESS:9091/ and use the login/password (default for above config transmission/transmission)

INSTALL FTP SERVER
Let's say that the file is i your pi disk. You're not at home. How can you check it? Maybe the easiest way is to setup an FTP server. Maybe the best program is vsftpd. You can install it:


Create a folder for ftp users (if it's not there).


Create a group called ftp-users.


Create a sample user called seedbox with home directory /srv/ftp/, and assign the user to ftp-users group.


Set password for the new user.



Now you should change few things:

And uncomment:

Start the service and you're done:


Personally I use the program filezilla but you can also use the Firefox addon FireFTP.

INSTALL SAMBA
OK, you installed torrent server. How can you access the downloaded files from your computer? Well it's easy. Just install SAMBA. For that reason, I followed the tutorial here.

First of all, install SAMBA.

Then all you have to do is to change SAMBA configuration file.


Just add the following lines:


You should restart SAMBA or you can reboot your Pi.


Now you can access your Pi from Nautilus (check here how to do that).

Android
If you want to use it via android phone/tablet, you can use the program Remote Transmission



More applications are Transdrone and TorrentToise.

To set a static IP in Debian based distros is easy. Just change a file (/etc/network/interfaces).
In openSUSE is easier. Everything can be done under YaST.

1. Open YaST and go to Network Devices>Network Settings.



2. Then choose Statically Assigned IP Address (move with tab button and click on space button). Give the static IP you want (IP address needs to be in the same range as the router's) and as Subnet Mask, 255.255.255.0. Press Next (press enter).



3. You'll see an overview of the ethernet card.



4. Go to Hostname/DNS and add Google's DNS servers (optional).



5. Next, go to Routing and add your router ip (usually 192.168.1.1).




Now press OK, reboot and try to login again with SSH.

We've seen how to install no-ip.
Fortunately, there's not only this service but other services too. Just for reference, here are some (not only free):

http://www.dyndns.org
http://freedns.afraid.org
http://www.zoneedit.com
http://www.no-ip.com
http://www.easydns.com
http://www.tzo.com
http://www.3322.org
http://www.dnsomatic.com
http://www.tunnelbroker.net
http://dns.he.net/
http://www.dynsip.org
http://www.sitelutions.com
http://www.dnsexit.com
http://www.changeip.com
http://www.zerigo.com
http://www.dhis.org
https://nsupdate.info
http://duckdns.org
https://www.loopia.com
https://www.namecheap.com
https://domains.google.com
https://www.ovh.com
https://www.dtdns.com
http://giradns.com

Let's see one of them https://freedns.afraid.org. After you register, go to Dynamic DNS link (on the left top box-for members).
Add your host with type A and subdomain and domain what you like as host.

Now there's going to be a list of your host names. Right click on the Direct Link and copy the link. You should keep the alpha-numeric key. The address will be something like http://freedns.afraid.org/dynamic/update.php?[alpha-numeric-key]

Now it's time to install the client. I've found it from https://github.com/troglobit/inadyn.

1. First of all, install the needed programs to build the service.


2. Then


3. Download the program from ftp://troglobit.com/inadyn/


and decompress it


4. Go to the directory


5. Compile and install



6. Create the confing file


with the following content


The bold words are the ones you should change. Remember the alphanumeric key is the one you got from right click on the Direct Link.

7. Start the client. Create the service file.


8. Add the following content.


9. Start the service


and enable the service


10. Reboot and check if the service is running.


you should get results something like:

We've seen how to install openSUSE image on the SD card.
Next step is to be sure that we can have access from outside our house (since most of the times, Raspberry Pi is located at home).
To do that we use Dynamic DNS services. A free service (so far) is No-IP. Most of the routers support it. You can use your router's service. But what if you want 2 different host names on the same IP? Let's say you have different ARM boards on the same router or you have a server etc.

1. First of all, install the needed programs to build the service (same as I did with ZNC)


2. Then


3. Download the program


and decompress it


4. Go to the directory


5. Compile and install


While it install’s the software you will prompted to enter the username & password. Once that is done it will ask you teh refresh interval … leave it.. to have the default value. You are required to answer some more questions … just ans NO an d you should be good to go.

6. Start the client


To check if the service is running, use the command:


and the results should be like



Auto start the client on reboot

But what if you reboot? You want to start the client everytime you reboot. This can be done with systemd.

1. Create the service file.


2. Add the following content.


3. Start the service


and enable the service

Most of the projects around the Internet use Raspbian as main Raspberry Pi distro. Unfortunately, Raspbian doesn't work for me. Minibian worked for me. So I serched other distros. My favourite is Arch Linux because there are plenty of programs that I need for projects, but it needs some extra steps from terminal to create the SD.

Here we'll see how to create an SD card with openSUSE. There are plenty of information at the wiki page https://en.opensuse.org/HCL:Raspberry_Pi
. I'll collect the information I need for projects I'll write next.

I used 13.1 as distro because it's easier for me to resize the SD card.

1. Download the image (openSUSE-13.1-ARM-JeOS-raspberrypi.armv7l.raw.xz) from here:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/ARM:/13.1:/Contrib:/RaspberryPi/images/

decompress the image.

2. Find the device name of your card


usually it's going to be /dev/mmcblk0.

and create the card (as root)


3. Since I didn't use a monitor (HDMI or DVI), I had to do some extra steps before boot my raspberry pi.

a. Delete the file /var/lib/YaST2/reconfig_system to start headless.
b. Resize the ext4 partition with Gparted.

4. When boot the Raspberry Pi, use the following

ssh root@IP


Now the first command will be


and then update